Embodiments of the disclosure relate generally to integrated circuits and, more particularly, to the wiring structure of a trench fuse component and corresponding methods of fabrication.
Many integrated circuits include millions of interconnected devices, such as transistors, resistors, capacitors, and diodes, on a single chip of a semiconductor substrate. Semiconductor integrated circuits can also include one or more types of memory, such as CMOS memory, antifuse memory, and fuse memory.
Some electrically programmable components of an electronic circuit can include fuses and antifuses. Fuses generally include a region of conductive material between two electrical contacts. The conductive material can be destroyed to become non-conductive when exposed to a threshold level of voltage or current. This process can be referred to as “programming” or “fusing” the fuse. Conversely, an “antifuse” refers to an integrated circuit structure in which two electrically conductive terminals are separated from each other by one or more regions composed of an electrically insulative material. Electric current can be permitted to flow between the two terminals by materially altering or destroying the regions of electrically insulative material. By transforming an electrically insulative region into an electrically conductive region, “programming” or “fusing” an antifuse can serve the opposite purpose of a programmable fuse.
Some IC components, including fuses and antifuses, can be in the form of a “deep trench” component. Generally, a “deep trench” component refers to an electrical component embedded at least partially within a buried insulator layer of a semiconductor-on insulator (SOI) structure. As IC structures have become smaller, fuse and antifuse structures have been used increasingly as a form of non-volatile memory. In particular, fuse and antifuse memory can permanently store certain items of unit-specific data such as serial numbers. Design considerations for fuses and e-fuses include decreasing the size of these components to accommodate a greater number of components in an IC structure, and increasing their versatility.